Salesforce.com hit again by performance issues

By
Chris Kanaracus
|
2 August 2012
|
IDG News Service

Salesforce.com was hit by another in a string of performance problems on Wednesday, with the issues this time centered on its email services.

The cloud CRM (customer relationship management) application vendor's system status site first noted a "performance degradation" with the email services at 10:18 BST. Further updates were issued approximately every half-hour, stating that teams were working to fix the problem.

Those activities were ongoing as of 13:30 BST, according to another update. Customers "may experience slowness with email services," according to the message.

The email problems don't appear to be as serious as other recent system issues at Salesforce.com. In July, Salesforce.com experienced a second major outage in as many weeks, with a number of application instances going down.

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Wednesday's email problems aren't necessarily cause for panic, according to one observer.

"This becomes an issue when clients are about to kick off an email campaign or align their sales activities with these email services," said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, via email. "Degradation for the past five hours is something to monitor but [customers should] not be too worried yet."

However, "if this continues into the peak business hours of 9 am PT to 2 am PT, we'll have to start digging deeper into which services, which processes, and what nodes," Wang added.

In any event, customers should appreciate the transparency provided by Salesforce.com's frequent system status updates, according to Wang.

We have been hearing for years how CIOs and senior IT professionals need to bury the hatchet with line of business managers and, instead of focusing on the latest bleeding-edge technology for its own sake, seek to better understand the overall strategic objectives of their organisations.